Читать книгу Stop Checking Your Likes - Susie Moore - Страница 9

CHAPTER ONE

Your Parents Effed You Up...Go for It Anyway

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they had.And add some extra, just for you.

PHILIP LARKIN, “This Be the Verse”

My sister is named after my dad’s mistress. He demanded it and my mom was too tired and depressed to fight him on it.

“That’s a pretty name!” she hears a lot.

“Thanks. I’m named after a family friend,” she answers.

I mean, it’s not a lie. Lovers are friends, too, right?

We were born into a love triangle. My dad was in love with Rita, a wealthy Polish woman, who was married and had no intention of leaving or divorcing her husband. To keep my dad “occupied” while she was with her husband, she would procure and manage girlfriends for him. She’d then swiftly cut them off if she felt like she had lost control when he appeared to develop a genuine interest in them. She even booked and paid for an abortion for one girlfriend.

She introduced my (also Polish) mom to my dad. My mom didn’t have money and wasn’t glamorous and so wasn’t considered threatening.

Both times my mom was pregnant — once with my sister and once with me — my dad’s “best friend” Rita insisted that she get abortions. My mom refused. And so, here we are. Here I am.

There are many strange things about my childhood, but I don’t think I’ve heard of this happening before, in any other family. Whenever I confide in someone about it, the response is a pretty unanimously, “What the??!!”

Yep.

This response has shown up in my life a fair amount, in fact. You’ll read lots of peculiar stories in this book, and there’s just one reason why I feel confident telling them: if you think any human, or family, is “normal,” you simply don’t know them well enough.

It’s not their fault, but every parent has messed up their kid(s) in some way. We forget that our parents are just humans who were kids like us once, too. And they certainly aren’t perfect. They have a lot of their own approval seeking going on within them, too. And hey, they had parents, too. And their parents had parents. It didn’t start with them. If you think you may have escaped this, think for a second how a parent’s praise and validation can really lift you up. And how being reprimanded or rejected by a parent can fill you with unease and shame. We care what they think. They shape how we feel about ourselves and the world. And it’s very easy to think this isn’t even happening.

In my coaching sessions — and in life — I avoid asking, “So what’s wrong with this person?” The real question we wanna ask is, “What’s happened to this person?”

As adults, we’re constantly projecting the environment we were put into, the things that happened to us, and the beliefs we inherited during our most formative years.

It all starts early, my friend.

This isn’t to hate on our parents. They’re just doing their best — we all are. This fact cannot be overstated. And the truth is, even the least praiseworthy parent can bestow great gifts on their kids. We treasure those and enjoy them throughout our life. This is true of my family, too.

Parental Lessons

My mom was born in war-torn Nazi-Soviet occupied Poland in 1942, into complete poverty. She grew up fighting for whatever rations of bread, potatoes, and water her family could find. She remembers most clearly the daily hunger and bitter cold in the winter, made worse by the lack of warm clothes and shoes. And it wasn’t until she was in her early twenties that she managed to flee to England.

In England she had a failed marriage to a Mauritian man, with whom she had three daughters (my three eldest sisters), and another failed relationship with my father (who never married her and had violent, unpredictable outbursts and multiple other women), with whom she had two daughters. Her life experiences have shaped in her the following beliefs that she projects:

•Hardship is necessary.

•Rich people can be very miserable (and evil).

•Don’t trust others too readily because it’s shocking what people can be capable of, even those closest to you.

She’s never felt truly worthy of many of the good things that we all deserve as human beings. But she was essentially a single mom of five girls, so I learned independence, resilience, and inner strength from her. I also learned how to move from country to country with ease (so far, I’ve lived in five). My mom also taught me never to be jealous of another person. To love people who love me. To never cling to a man. To take a chance. To love reading autobiographies. To save. To relax more. To be kind. To always look for a bargain. To not be ashamed of my poor and unstable upbringing. To not worry about pleasing everyone. To not be afraid to ask. To enjoy simple pleasures (the bird! the trees! the raindrops on the leaves!).

My late dad was a complicated person. He was paradoxically incredibly smart and loving yet completely scary and abusive at times. It was like he was two totally unrelated people. In his youth he had knee surgery for an injury he sustained from playing rugby and became addicted to painkillers, which turned into a full-blown drug and alcohol addiction (he actually kept ecstasy pills in his socks). Back then there was no talk of an opioid epidemic that leads to lifetime addiction. His struggle followed him to the end, when he died at age fifty-nine from heart failure.

My mom left him for the first time when I was six months old because she wouldn’t give him our last ten pounds for a bottle of Smirnoff. We needed the cash for the electricity meter (back then, people used to feed the meter with coins to pay their utility bill). He was so desperate for booze that he lit a lighter and held it to my head, threatening to burn me if she didn’t give it to him. It was her first walk-out moment (even after a black eye and a nearly broken jaw, it took a threat to her child for a change to happen — maternal love is fierce).

That’s how addicted he was and how wild he could act (she still remembers how crazy his eyes looked, and she physically recoils when describing them more than three decades later). It wasn’t the first time she’d leave, a pattern many people in abusive, dysfunctional relationships are familiar with. My mom still maintains that her ability to be quiet and calm and not provoke him possibly saved her life. I can’t help but concur. In a rage, my dad once threw a barstool at me. Dumbfounded, I threw it back. Luckily for us both, we had terrible throwing skills.

And yet, after he survived a heart attack in his fifties, my mom encouraged my relationship with my father, and we moved closer to him after years of keeping a distance and living in shelters to avoid him. She’d been to Al-Anon a lot by then, and we all grew to understand that addiction is an illness, not a choice. The older and sicker he got, the meeker he became. And I got to know my dad as a human being before he died, when I was nineteen. I saw his tender and sensitive sides. This taught me not to judge anyone too quickly when only seeing one version of them. Jekyll and Hyde are real, folks (anyone who loves an addict I’m sure will be feeling me here — to this day no other person has ever evoked such a range of emotions within me).

And so, my dad also taught me a deep love of literature. And to bring joy and lightness through surprises. He’d put candy under our pillows, and one day he wore a balaclava to the gas station and said “jellybeans, please,” as he proceeded to pay for them. The gas station attendant went white in the face. My sister and I died laughing. He’d send letters disputing a speeding ticket with “Season’s Greetings!” and “Get Well Soon!” stickers on the envelope. Not to mention the time he sent a copy of a local history book he authored to Buckingham Palace. The royal family always sends a courtesy thank-you letter for all the gifts they receive, and he photocopied the response, liquid-papered over their text, and wrote “her majesty is enjoying the book, and keeps it at her bedside.” (He kept this framed above his desk, of course, and showed every single visitor to the house, including the religious mission workers, who soon regretted knocking.)

My dad showed me that you must always help a friend in need, something his Jewish mother instilled in him strongly (one time during a sober stretch a sick neighbor asked to borrow money, and my dad gave him more than he asked for and insisted it was his gift, something I’ve always remembered). He taught me how to laugh at the ordinary, small things. How to be sarcastic. How to have fun in daily rebellion (you don’t need to pay the parking meter if you just stop for ten minutes, and if you’re shopping in the supermarket, the chips you snack on while cruising the aisles are complimentary). How to parallel park. How to win at Scrabble. How to cook a roast lamb and really enjoy it. How humor trumps everything else, and how it can ameliorate almost any pain.

Looking at the Bad Stuff

But what about the rest of the stuff we learn from our parents? The bad stuff that holds us back a lot of the time? We can investigate it a little, right? Question it? Be curious about it?

We’re allowed to do that and still love the people who raised us. Part of us does, whether we like it or not. Children love who they need to love.

Recently, I was having a coffee with a well-known stylist in New York, and she told me that a lot of the fashion rules we inherit as women come from our mothers. Beliefs like “never wear a red coat!” or “jeans with holes in them are for tramps” or “your handbag must always match your shoes!”

And this stuff — however outdated or irrelevant now — stays with us. Now, a red coat may or may not be your style, but that’s not the point. The point is that we’re always listening to and learning from other people. We have to in the beginning, just to survive. But our lives don’t stop there. We have the ultimate say in what we become, have, and even wear in our adulthood.

Fashion wasn’t my mom’s thing at all. I offloaded on my poor stylist friend all about it when she was probably expecting a light chat about fall trends. I explained to her that when I was growing up, clothing was a touchy subject in my household because you had to have money to be selective, right? My family lived on donations from local families, hand-me-downs from neighbors, and clothing from the school donation baskets.

I remember the desperate ache for approval I felt as a kid wearing used clothes. But my mom’s indifference to what we all wore remained ironclad: “It’s clean, has no wrinkles, so why are you complaining?”

It was humiliating for me. I lived in fear of being caught wearing a friend’s cast-off item that they might recognize. I would spend hours thinking of how I could change a small detail — even a single button — to keep people from suspecting it was the same garment.

Even when it was hot one day in the classroom, I refused to take off a layer, despite sweating at my desk after running around outside. Why? In case “cool Rosie” saw I was in her cardigan (it had her name written on the inside in permanent marker: ROSIE KIM). I mean, if I had been caught in her hand-me-down cardie, what would Rosie think? What would everyone else think? That I’m poor? That I’m not good enough to have my own clothes? That I’m beneath them or even...invisible?

Pleasing the “They”

As a kid, you desperately want approval and will do anything to get it. And it’s understandable in a kid, right? Because you just want to blend in. Standing out even in the smallest way can feel risky.

But what might feel true in an elementary-school classroom is absolutely, completely not true in the real world. Just try to think of even one huge success story you know about a person who completely blended in or who staunchly followed the rules and never went their own way. Go ahead, rack your brains: there isn’t one. The people we read about and look up to are never the ones who lead their lives consumed by the need for others’ approval. They’re self-directed, not in a prison of pleasing. This includes, in many cases, being comfortable detaching with love from their parents’ expectations and desires for them.

Somewhere along the line, these stand-out people learned something very true and very important: that they themselves are their own best asset. They learned that they’re special and that nourishing that specialness means they should avoid listening to the voice of the collective “they” as much as possible. You know the “they” I’m referring to: the people we constantly talk about who tell us how to “live life right” — a college degree, a spouse, a close family, macrobiotic muffins for the kids (who are above average at school, of course). This internalized voice of the “they” tells us we need to be like everyone else if we want to be normal and worthy.

But we act that way to please the “they” a lot of the time, don’t we? We want everyone to like us, to accept us. We just want to fit in and gain approval — and we’ll go to crazy lengths to do so. We spend money we don’t have going to destination weddings for people we don’t like that much, we dedicate our lives to careers that don’t excite us because they sound impressive, and we laugh at jokes we secretly think are stupid, even offensive.

Maybe your parents did that, too. Maybe they still do it. But it’s not going to make you happy. It’s not going to help you to know yourself. How do I know this?

Because I had to get over seeking the approval of others early on. There’s no way a kid like me, who lived in homeless shelters with a nomadic, depressed mother and an addicted father, fit the ideals of the regular families on TV — with their own houses (gardens, even!), no daily screaming, and no police showing up at the door at night because the neighbors reported drug use or suspected domestic violence (what fun!).

I had every reason to be ashamed of my unusual family. And I was. So what can you do when you’re stuck in an environment that feels wrong to you? You can minimize how much your circumstances really affect you. You control what you can. You can choose to be quiet and tune in to yourself. (I mean, what other sane choice is there?) And it turns out that even as a kid, you have more power than you think. When we give our survival instincts a chance, they’re stronger than our shame.

This instinct divinely led me to start on a self-help journey when I was fifteen, when I found The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz in a bookstore for 50 pence (63 cents). It opened my eyes to the world of choice and the power we all have as individuals. Everything changed for me that day. I haven’t stopped reading since (one of the most popular articles I ever wrote is called “Top 5 Lessons from 500+ Self-Help Books” — Google it for the CliffsNotes version of this book!).

And as my young adult life was taking its own inner shape, I fantasized about things I wanted to do when I was an adult:

•Live in New York City

•Have a big job that paid me a ton of money (so I could take care of my mom if she needed it)

•Write for fancy magazines

•Be in a “normal” marriage with a man who respected me and loved me fiercely

•Do important work that made other people feel happier

•Be the fairy princess of a unicorn ranch

And the truth is, I achieved these goals simply because I tapped into the inner, real, powerful me I came to understand existed. I had to. I loved my parents but did not want a life like theirs. I learned that to create a different kind of life, you must do things differently.

DIRECT MESSAGE

Simple, right? If you want a different result, you have to do things differently. Where might you already notice yourself repeating something not useful or healthy right now — even a small family pattern you might recognize in yourself? It can be dangerously quiet!

In some ways, I was lucky to have had the childhood I had, because I got started on this path of self-discovery before many people get to. In fact, I got to tick off all these childhood goals by the time I turned thirty. (Except, sadly, for the unicorn ranch. That ambition is still unreached.) But it doesn’t matter when you start — what’s important is that you get started. You can make this shift at any time. You can pursue your goals and passions with the belief that you deserve for them to become real-life manifestations.

After living in women’s shelters as a kid, I learned how parents are just like us. They’re scared, too — just taller and older. And the power they have to make choices as grown-ups can scare them a lot because every choice brings a consequence. When I was six or seven years old, a woman I lived with in the shelter told me that her husband used to put pebbles in the driveway so he’d know if she left the house. She stayed for years, enduring all sorts of behavior control and abuse. Her parents (and in-laws) were Catholic, and divorce didn’t feel like an option. She thought she had to stay, since they were wealthy and respected churchgoers. And so I learned early on that “staying in your lane” and not ruffling feathers isn’t just exhausting but dangerous, too.

This is why I’m obsessed with overcoming this approval-seeking problem: because I had every reason to live a small, scared life. I had an unstable upbringing, I was shuttled around to more than twenty schools, my family was riddled with addiction and mental illness, I received no formal education after the age of eighteen, and I was divorced when I was twenty-three. But along the way, I’ve realized that the mark of success isn’t escaping life’s challenges and the suffering. Because suffering is a given, no matter who you are or what you have. It’s about working through the challenges and facing the suffering, knowing you have options. And that you’ll be okay.

DIRECT MESSAGE

Never underestimate the fact that you have options in almost every situation. No matter how hopeless something seems, there are always at least three solutions to every problem (more on this to come). The more options you allow yourself to see, the more empowered you’ll always be. That even rhymes.

We’re so used to falling for approval traps — big and small — that we don’t even know how much we’re holding back sometimes. But I know one thing for sure: provided that your intentions are good, you need zero permission in this world to do whatever you want. There’s no such thing as a good excuse. Because it’s still a dang excuse. You’re born with that permission slip we talked about in the introduction. You just lost it somewhere along the way on a day you probably don’t even remember. And I get why you dropped it. It can be really scary out there. And plenty of people will tell you what you can and cannot be, do, and have.

It’s okay even if your mom and dad were those people. They did their best for you. But now that you’re an adult, it’s time for you to do the best for yourself.

Check this:

Take some time to consider what beliefs you inherited. Most people never do this — they just accept family beliefs as fact.

Question what beliefs might not be useful anymore. Allow yourself space to replace them with what feels right for you. Your heart knows.

Lovingly accept that your parents had their lives but that this is your time. They forged their path and made their choices; the baton’s now in your paws.

Forgive your parents. They’re human, just like you.

Get excited about the unlimited possibilities of your life! Just think about them. A million options are available to you right now. Have you ever considered that? And if you want to, buy a red coat and wear it with ripped jeans.